Scrum developers’ glossary

Well, I’ve been in SCRUM and Lean principles for the past 18+ months, and I thought maybe it makes sense to present to outside world a glossary of keywords that we use in our day to day work.

Scrum developer’s glossary

Forming, storming, norming,performing – the 4 stages that a team needs to pass to become a well performing team

Sprint – it’s the basic unit, the container of the development process, usually lasts 2 weeks, sometimes may be 3

Product Owner – the product manager(s) that creates the User stories

Product Backlog– a prioritized list of the User Stories, usually ordered based on value delivered to the business

Sprint Planning Meeting (SPM) – precedes the Sprint, and the Sprint is kicked off with SPM, where the Product Owner presents

Planning Poker – A game of estimation. For each user story a number of rounds of estimations happen, until there are only 2 estimation cards raised. and the upper value is picked as the User Story Point of that User Story

Baseline User Story – a User Story that is selected as a baseline. Other User Stories are usually evaluated in comparison to this User Story. It is always recommended to pick a User Story with 3 or 5 User Story Points.

Spike – A research. Something that is not a User Story but does have a result. Example includes, if a User Story is not possible to be implemented because there are certain uncertainties. Then a Spike is organised when the team looks in to eliminate the uncertainties.

Sprint Review Meeting (SRM) – the meeting with which the Sprint concludes. In the SRM the team presents the User Stories to Product Owner(s).

User Story – The description, usually in one sentence of what the User/Product Owner wants to achieve, followed by a list of acceptance criteria. It can also include screenshots, drawings.

Definition of Done (DoD) – A list of criteria that

User Story Definition of Done

the tasks needs to fit in order to be marked as done.

Example: User Story Definition of Done - means the following tasks need to be performed on a user story:

All acceptance criteria are met

Implementation finished

Code review carried out (or the code has been produced with pair-programming)

Unit Tests written

Functional testing has been carried out

Integration tests are written/carried out

Area Regression testing is performed

No Related Blocker or Critical bug is open

Checked into repository

If applicable the Automated Selenium tests are created

Stand up – A daily 15 minute stand up meeting, where each member of the team tells what they have done from the previous standup until now, what impediments do they have, and what will they be working on until the next standup

Impediment –is an obstacle, can be anything that does not allow the team to be productive. Scrum Master is usually responsible for fixing/eliminating the impediments.

Scrum Master— an important part of the SCRUM methodology. A person that makes sure that the team adheres to SCRUM principles and SCRUM ceremonies.

Scrum Team—the Development Team, Scrum Master and the Product Owner team together

Sit Down – An informal, Mojitos-Amigos invented meeting, where the team sits down in a meeting room and discusses whether the Sprint goes as planned or no? who needs help on their task, etc.

Task split – The process of splitting the User Story into tasks. Usually of maximum 6 hours each.

Task - Sample tasks can be “Implementation of the functionality”, “creation of Unit Tests”, “Functional Testing”, “Research the topic”, “automated Selenium test creation”… etc. Usually not limited and new tasks can be invented

R&D – A task where before starting to work on the User Story, the team checks different possible solutions to see which one is appropriate

Scrum Board

Scrum Board – a board usually divided to 5 zones. “User Stories”, “Tasks”, “Tasks in Progress”, “Done Tasks”, “Misc”. its updated by the team during each day’s standup. It visualizes the running status of the Sprint, and makes everything transparent.

Confidence Level – The confidence of the team in percentages, that they will be able to close every user story they have committed to, usually discussed in the end of the standup. If low, appropriate measures need to be carried out: such as user story reprioritization by the product owner.

Burn Down Chart – A chart that’s updated regularly to show the current number of hours that team still has to spend on tasks, and the team’s capacity left at the moment. Ideally the graph is burned down and becomes 0 on the eve of the Sprint Review Meeting day.

Incident – something that is not welcomed by the team, however it needs

The Retrospective Box

to deal with. An incident happened on the production environment. That is a potential woe to the success of the sprint, since the team needs to find extra hours to spend on fixing that issue.

Retrospective– A regular meeting, held immediately after the SPM, where the team

members raise topics both positive and negative, and later group the topics to discuss.

Retrospective Box – A paper box, where during the sprint, the team members drop

the topics that they want discuss in the next/upcoming retrospective.

QnA Session – A regular, optional meeting (max 15 minutes) where the team answers questions from any department

DIBS– Day in between sprints, the day immediately after Sprint Review Meeting, when the team is free to work on any innovative topic they want to work on. Check new technologies, write mobile applications, etc…

I am very sure this is not all, as soon as I remember, hear more keywords I‘ll add these into the post.